I’ve been a puppet, a pauper, a pirate, a poet, a pawn and a king.” — Frank Sinatra, “That’s Life”
I had always planned to be a writer. In 1993, a year out of college and eager to be around books, I answered an ad for a job in publishing—and somehow wound up with an entry-level job on Wall Street instead. Before I knew it, the job had become a career, and the novel I was working on went in a drawer.
The itch didn’t go away, though. I had a longstanding interest in politics and policy and a love of the performing arts, so while still on Wall Street I started blogging and writing reviews. Then the industry where I had made my career became the center of a national crisis. In 2010, I left finance to write full time, both as a critic and commentator and as a creative writer.
Since 2015 I have been a regular columnist at The Week, and since 2019 I have been the theater and film critic at Modern Age. From 2012 through 2017, I served as senior editor, featured political blogger and theater critic at The American Conservative. My political writing has appeared in The New York Times, USA Today, The New Republic, Foreign Policy, and Politico, and my writing on culture and the arts has also appeared in the New York Times Book Review, The New Republic and The Weekly Standard among other venues.
I’ve appeared multiple times on Bloggingheads.tv sparring with pundits like Ross Douthat (of The New York Times), Matthew Yglesias (of Vox), Conor Friedersdorf (of The Atlantic), and Stephen Walt (of Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government). I was interviewed on CNN about the 2016 Republican primaries, on NPR about the conflict between President Trump and the American military and intelligence establishment, and on Voice of America about reparations for slavery.
I am currently at work on a book, The Folio of This World, about Shakespeare and the Hebrew bible, portions of which have appeared in The Jewish Review of Books.
But my first love isn’t analysis or criticism. It’s story-telling.
Beginning right after I left finance, I wrote a number of screenplays, both shorts and features. I didn’t confine myself to one genre or style, focusing instead on stories that I found personally compelling, and letting the genre and style emerge from the nature of the story itself.
Since then, I have directed two short films from scripts of my own: Gone Fishing (2014), and the award-winning Public Speaking (2017), which was a finalist for best narrative short at the Austin Film Festival.
In the course of marketing one of my scripts, I developed a relationship with Paper Street Films, with whom I partnered on several feature films. These include: Infinitely Polar Bear (2014), written and directed by Maya Forbes, starring Mark Ruffalo and Zoe Saldana; The Runner (2015), written and directed by Austin Stark, starring Nicolas Cage and Sarah Paulson; and The Seagull (2018), written by Stephen Karam based on the play by Anton Chekhov, directed by Michael Mayer, and starring Annette Bening and Saoirse Ronan. I also executive produced We’ve Forgotten More Than We Ever Knew (2016), written and directed by Thomas Woodrow, starring Louisa Krause and Doug Jones.
I’m currently attached to direct my first feature, Resentment, from a script I wrote, and I have a number of other projects concurrently in development.